Jeff Abbott - Collision

Ben groped for his cell phone. Gone. He remembered Jackie had taken it.

Blood welled from the laces of his running shoes. The pain in his chest throbbed and he probed his flesh, half-afraid to find a bullet hole. His chest ached to the bone, as though it had taken a hammer’s blow. A tear in his shirt pocket. He found a hard rectangle beneath the hole. Pilgrim’s small sketchbook, with the drawings of the young girl, wore a bullet embedded in the leather cover.

He had to find Pilgrim, but he had to get off the streets. He was bloodied and muddied and memorable.

He ran toward a convenience store and the alley behind it.

It was a surprise to learn that homeless people had cell phones. A group of three men stood behind the store. They stopped talking, giving Ben a suspicious glare as he approached them.

“Excuse me,” Ben said, “is there a pay phone nearby?”

“Naw,” one of the men said. “What happened to you?”

“I fell into a ditch. Hurt my foot.” All three men looked down and inspected his foot; blood oozed from the sock.

“Church down the street, they give you some ice for that,” one man said.

“Ice and a prayer,” a second man laughed. “Who you need to call?”

“Friend. He’ll come get me.” Ben glanced over his shoulder. No sign of pursuit. They’d have risked being seen if they’d lingered, with the crowd at the bus station looking for them. It didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be combing the area looking for him.

“You’re the man on the front page,” the first man said.

Ben froze. The three men studied him.

“Yeah,” the second man said.

“We stay informed. Ain’t got much else to do but look at the paper,” the third man said.

“Is there a reward?” the first man asked. The other two moved in a circle, cutting off Ben’s lines of retreat.

“Please. Please don’t report me.” He was begging for a break from people who’d either never had one or never made the most of one they’d gotten. “I’m innocent. Please. I’m trying to stop the people who killed my wife.”

The three men looked at each other. “Like on The Fugitive?” one asked. Ben nodded.

“If there’s a reward, cops’ll figure out a way not to pay us, that’s for damn sure,” the first man said. “I don’t want to be on TV, either. Family’s always looking for me.”

“Here.” The second man dipped in his pocket, pulled out a bulky phone. “You can use mine but no more than one minute. Prepaid. Got mine at Wal-Mart. And nothing personal, but I hold the phone so you don’t run off.”

“His foot’s bleeding, he runs, it’s a short race,” the first man said and laughed at his own wit.

The man held the phone and, stunned, Ben dialed the number. Then the man moved the phone to Ben’s ear. “Speak up clear, Mr. Fugitive. It’s not the best-quality sound.”

The threat of rain hadn’t kept the soccer fields empty; dozens of families and kids, in varying shades of uniforms and ranging from ages four to ten, wandered between the rectangles of green. Mothers, fathers, and siblings stood on the sidelines, chatting among themselves or calling out sweetened encouragement to the players. Coaches clapped and frowned; high school kids serving as referees blew whistles and acted supremely bored.

Dads cheered their daughters. Pilgrim knew Tamara played soccer but he’d never worked up the nerve to watch a game from a distance; the risk was too great. Why did he choose this place, filled with fathers and daughters? Salt in the wound, rubbed there himself.

Pilgrim moved through the crowd. He was dressed in a phone repairman’s shirt and baseball cap, a treasure from his cache, and he stayed on the edge of the crowd.

He spotted two people watching him in the first five minutes: a soccer mom who didn’t seem to know the other moms on her side of the field, standing a bit apart, arms crossed, her eyes not fixed on the glorious play of a child but instead scanning the crowd a bit too often. There was another, a compactly built young man in a referee’s shirt, but the shirt was untucked and hanging loose over long pants. Might be a gun there. He was no bigger than the teenaged refs, but his face was that of an older man. He kept glancing around at the other games.

Neither approached him. They wanted him to talk to Vochek. Probably they would try to take him after they talked, when he left.

But she had broken her promise, or a superior had overruled her. Stupid.

A group of six-year-old boys had finished their match and their obligatory juice box and snack, and they and their parents walked as a herd. He stayed close among them, a cell phone at his ear, pretending to be deep in conversation.

He walked into the parking lot with them and glanced back. The watchers were still in place and he didn’t make anyone else following him. He ducked into his car and didn’t bother backing up. He barreled forward, over the curb and into the grass, and shot out onto the road. He had preprogrammed Vochek’s cell number into his phone. He pressed the button.

“I said come alone,” he said.

A sigh. “I wanted to,” she said. “Got vetoed.”

At least she was smart enough not to deny the obvious. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t deal if you break agreements.”

“I can offer you a deal. How about if you come and talk to me and my boss.”

“I must decline your kind invitation. I’m sorry, you’ve bruised my trust.”

She was quiet for a moment and her voice softened. “Randall. I know you have a daughter. Tamara. I could make it so you can see Tamara again.”

A chill slipped into his chest like a knife. “You stay the hell away from my kid. And my ex-wife.”

“I don’t mean them harm, I’m trying to give you what you want.”

“You don’t know what I want, Vochek.”

“Then you tell me what you want.”

“To talk with someone with the actual power to negotiate with me. Good-bye.”

“Wait, please, I need to know what’s going down in New Orleans.”

“I need to know, too. Good-bye, Vochek.” He hung up and did an immediate U-turn, pulled into a Jack in the Box parking lot, and waited.

Five minutes later, he saw her, in a Ford sedan, pull past. Two other cars, both Fords, stayed close to her.

He pulled out after them. Tailing in Plano was both easy and challenging; the roads tended to be straight shots, but traffic was heavy-it was a suburb of a quarter million people-and drivers wove in and out of lanes for every inch of advantage. The trick was to stay close, not too close, and not lose them in the quickly changing lights. Without showing yourself.

The three cars headed back toward a shopping mall, then turned into a neighborhood across the street. Pilgrim was surprised to see a runway bisecting the neighborhood, a series of hangars with an array of private planes sheltering under the tin roofs. He U-turned hard, saw the cars stop in front of one of the houses.

Found you, he thought. What an interesting place for a safe house, with an airport built right in.

At the shopping center he located a place to perch where he could still see the house. She and her colleagues would go inside, she would call her boss, report failure, perhaps plead for another chance.

Interesting they didn’t go back to an office. Vochek, Ben had said, was based in Houston. He wondered if her colleagues were local. If they were, and they left soon…

His phone buzzed. He didn’t recognize the number calling. He clicked it on. “Yes.”

“It’s Ben.”

“Yes.”

“I need help.”

“Explain.”

“I’m six blocks from the apartment. Slight accident. Hurt my foot. Hector came over, and he got wild, you know how he is.”